


The Third Way

by deborah_judge



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Academia, Angst, Bittersweet, F/M, Fix-It, Timey-Wimey, archeology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-18
Updated: 2013-02-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 18:50:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Archeology, angst, roads not taken and timey-wimey romance.  River during her postgraduate studies.  Includes implied library fixit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Third Way

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to rirenec for betareading.

Sometime in the first week of her postgraduate studies, River is chatting with two of her new friends, Tiger and Jayce. "Why did you decide to write your thesis on the Doctor?" Tiger asks.

"I'm in love with him," River says. It's straightforward enough.

Jayce laughs. "Oh I know," he says. "This one here, there was a time when she was digging in the ruins of Ultima Proxima Three, and she found a piece of a lute played by the Great Bard Thalia and I swear to you Tiger actually kissed it."

"That was you," Tiger says, "Snogging a reprinted version of an original manuscript by Michael Weaver on the fortieth century culture of the middle continent of Aurora One."

"I was excited," Jayce says, "you can't blame me."

"It's like he thinks if he loves middle Aurora One culture enough he'll bring it back. Like all he has to do is study it and it'll be as if it never died."

"Who says it died?" Jayce says. "Besides, you're the same way."

River looks from one to the other and she can't help herself, she just starts to laugh and laugh and laugh. She knows she'll feel right at home.

By the end of her first year of postgraduate studies River knows how to read three dead languages, even when they're written in bad handwriting on parchment or stone. Her thesis director tells her that the first three languages are the hardest, eventually she'll get a sense of how languages work and each one will be easier. She's already starting to see patterns, connections. She learns the word _Doctor_ in all its permutations and translations: healer, fixer, warrior, sage. She traces it and retraces it in every language she knows.

*

The first time the Doctor visits her she's in her second year, taking a break from digging up a three-hundred-year old house in a bog two miles south of her university. It's just a local dig, just for practice. She doesn't think the Doctor was there. It's still a challenge to figure out who _was_ there, and why the devil they'd decided to build a house - a large house - in an area that was nothing but uninhabited swamp. She's punching some trees to work out her frustration when she hears the TARDIS behind her.

"I just wanted to see that you're okay," the Doctor says. He's wearing a dark suit, he looks older than when she met him. He also looks like he might be in pain. She doesn't want to talk to him. She thinks about Madame Kovarian training her to kill him and the feel of his lips during the long, slow kiss in which she brought him back to life.

"I'm fine," she says. " Now go away." She thinks for a minute. "Unless you want to help me with my paper? Care to pop back three hundred years ago and tell me why they built this house?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Cheating doesn't become you, River Song."

"I'll take that as no then," she says. She remembers the feel of his hearts beating under her hands and the breath he took and exhaled on her face. She thinks about the names of all the kicks she learned just in case she might need them to kill him. "Then please get lost so I can do my work." She opens one of her books, furiously pretends to read, and doesn't look up until he's gone. 

It takes River three months to figure out what was going on with the house, but she comes up with a theory having to do with climate change, fur markets and trading. She keeps digging and finds more evidence to prove it. She realizes that she knows the people who once lived in this house in a way they haven't been known for three hundred years.

*

River's thesis director, Professor Anand Price, is the galaxy's greatest expert on Harriet Jones. He knows her in all her timelines: reporter, musician, soldier, Member of Parliament, Prime Minister, and about the golden age that did and didn't happen under her governance. He was the one who explained to River why you can't do archeology by just hopping around in a time machine. Time lines diverge, he said. Time changes, time breaks, and sometimes all that's left of it are fragments and shards. He thinks he's reconstructed a Harriet Jones, Commander of Allied Forces, who led humanity on its first conquest of other planets. He hasn't published it yet, though, because he's still not sure it happened.

The library's full of books about the Doctor, some of them nonsense, some of them clever, many of them contradictory. River traces the line of the Doctor's presence, and then the line of his absence, all the places that he wasn't, all the places he could have been. There is a woman in some of the older books whose name is water, she killed the Doctor to stop him from doing great harm. River thinks about the regenerations that she gave up, all the many lives that she could have had, all the things she could have done, and about how none of it matters as much as knowing that the Doctor is alive.

*

The next time the Doctor visits River kisses him, jumps him before he can speak to try to talk her out of it. He doesn't kiss her back or touch her, but he doesn't say no either and there's a way his body responds as if it's used to being close to hers. He tastes like fire and death and and pain. She tells herself she's kissing him because it's research, another piece of data to go with the one that never leaves her mind: _when you find River Song, tell her that I love her_. It tells her something. Not enough, but something. 

"You shouldn't have done that, River," the Doctor says. His voice is calm. There's something he's not saying.

"You didn't stop me," she shrugs. "If you come back again I'll do it again." 

"Tell me, River," he says. His hair is messy from her hands and there's an ache in his eyes. "Tell me. I need to know. Are you happy here?"

"Very," she says, surprising herself with how true it sounds when she says it. "When I was young, I thought I had two choices, since I was doomed to be obsessed with you: I could either love you or hate you. Marry you or kill you. But it turned out I had a third: I could write a doctoral thesis."

"My River Song," he says. "So clever." She wants to hit him for being condescending but there's something in how he looks at her that makes her stop. "Do you really think this is what will make you happy? Books? Papers that you'll write?" His eyes darken even more. "A library?"

"There's peace in it," she says. "I've had very little peace." It's precious to her. "I can destroy or I can love. Or I can understand." She realizes that she's begging. "I want to understand," she says.

Time flows in circles, backwards and forwards and around. Nothing is dead, nothing ends, not when there are still people alive to study it. An archeologist brings life to dead places, digs up pieces and shards and creates from them something that can live, if only in memory. It's a third path, as deep in its way as love and anger. There is a power in it. She won't be the woman who kills the Doctor, or the woman who marries him. She'll be the woman who tells his story.

*

River turns thirty-seven in the fourth year of her doctorate. She's older than most of her colleagues because of the time she spent learning how to kill people and then learning how to stop, but she tells everyone it's her forty-third birthday because she knows she regenerated old and wants people to think she looks young for her age. Jayce throws her a birthday party in his apartment, then takes her dancing, which given their postgraduate student budgets means a long walk through the forest behind campus to a bright clearing and then swinging her around to the music of the stars. She wakes up in Jayce's arms the next morning. He's a good man, he understands her, and loving him doesn't make her love the Doctor any less.

As part of her research assistant work, Professor Anand Price assigns River to look into the Doctor's role in the political downfall of Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. It involves deciphering twenty-first century Earth newsreels, nasty stuff, and reporter's notes that are as tough to read as anything she'd ever dug up in the basement of a ruined building. She brings her results to Anand, who looks them over with her. "I just want to make sure I didn't get them wrong," she says.

"You didn't," he says. And it's all there, the rumor the Doctor had started that Harriet Jones was looking tired, looking old, and how much damage the rumor had done her. Not that was the only thing that had brought her down, or even the major cause of it. You can't make arguments like that from one archeological artifact. But it was there.

"The people we study aren't always perfect. They aren't always good. You know that," Anand says. And she does know that, that's why she's made the choice she did, the choice to find a third way. For a moment she's on the verge of deciding that she'll never let the Doctor see her old, that she'll shoot herself in the head and regenerate before she lets that happen. And then of course she remembers, she doesn't have any regenerations left. Then she thinks about Anand and about everything he's given for the different versions of Harriet Jones, the scholar and the warrior and the leader, how much of his life he's given to studying her, and suddenly everything she's given for the Doctor doesn't feel wrong or out of place at all.

*

There is a woman in the stories whose name is water. She ends the Doctor's life when it is time for him to die. Or, perhaps, she marries him. She is taken from her university on the day she completes her doctorate in her graduation gown to serve the Silence and is placed in a suit that will force her to kill the Doctor. River remembers Madame Kovarian teaching her to kill a man with one stroke of her hands. It was necessary, she explained. Sometimes for the universe to exist there is a death that needs to happen, and someone needs to be trained to do it. Be that as it may, River has already made plans to leave before her graduation day, ungowned. Her job at University of One Delta is waiting and she'll miss being hooded by her advisor but she's happy for them to post her diploma. There are many words for water, in all the languages of the galaxy.

"Tell me you're happy here," the Doctor asks her, the last time he visits. On every visit he seems older, although he still looks like a child. He still looks like he's in pain.

"I am," she says. She's said it before. It's obvious why he keeps asking her the same question. "You're not," she says. "Not happy. Because of something I've done. Or haven't done." She takes a breath, then lets it out. "Tell me," she says.

"River," he says. "you could be something…not more than this, Something different. I can't make you leave the library, I can make it possible and give you whatever you need but you have to choose it. If it's what you want. River," he says. "This is my last chance. I can't do this again without crossing my own timeline. I know you've found a third way. I don't want you to take it. Please." 

"You're asking me to kill you," she says.

"I'm asking you to marry me."

She knows the history, knows what is supposed to happen to her and to him if she doesn't take the third way she's found. "I'm supposed to kill you," she says. 

"I know," he answers. And she understands, he's asking her to make a choice, to choose between the three ways available to her, to love him not in the way she wants to but in the way he needs. She can do it, if anyone can, she's trained in how to put a timeline back together from its shards and there's a sense in which there's no one in the galaxy who knows him better than she does. What he's asking makes her angry, but that doesn't matter, she's been angry with him before. And time moves in concentric circles, there are many possible stories to create out of artifacts, but maybe nothing matters more than that he needs her and she loves him. 

"One condition," she says. She moves closer, too close, as close as she has every right to be. His hand slips to her shoulder, like it can't help being there, and then down her back, touching her with complete familiarity and yet trembling, as if it's been a long time since he's touched her. "Make love to me," she says. "I'm going to need the memory." She can't put the story together in her mind without one final piece.

"That's all?" he says, and his face is bright and it's like he's talking to a woman she doesn't know yet, like the first time he told her that he loved her with his dying breath. "Yes, that's it, River you're brilliant. Thank you," he says, "thank you for giving me one last chance. One last chance to give you something you can remember." His mouth is gentle and open on her forehead, his hands are light on her back, and she feels all her regenerations inside him. And then he looks at her, and she knows it's her he's seeing, and she feels like she could live a thousand years and never be loved as much as she is in that moment. 

Once they're naked she presses his hands to the ground. She can tell he knows how to touch her, knows how her body responds, but she doesn't want that, doesn't want to know everything that will come, so he lies back and invites her to touch him. Her hands explore him, feeling a landscape that she doesn't yet understand, while he looks up at her, open and trusting, and she can't imagine what she's done to make him trust her so completely but whatever it is she knows she has to find it. He's in bliss when she embraces him, every muscle alive. _Remember_ , he mouths into her skin, and she knows she will. Not even death could take this memory away from her. 

*

The next day River defends her thesis, entitled "Strength in the Absence of the Doctor". It's a comparative study of excavations on three different worlds that survived a major crisis without the Doctor's help, and how it shows they compared (not unfavorably, as it turned out) to three in similar circumstances that the Doctor had visited. It passes with distinction. She goes home and finds that Tiger has decorated her home with banners and invited about fifty of her closest friends. "The Doctor is here!" Tiger shouts when River walks in and she does a take and a double-take before she realizes that Tiger's talking about her.

She breaks up with Jayce after the party. It's a hard breakup, they'd been together for nearly three years and he'd been talking about following her to her new job. "Is there another man?" he asks, just because it's so sudden.

"The only other man I love is the Doctor," River says, knowing he'll misunderstand, not caring.

University of One Delta is in a different time zone so she just leaves messages on a bunch of answering machines saying that she's not coming. She has another commitment. Something unavoidable. Something she can't get away from, no matter how hard she tries.

At her graduation, Professor Anand Price places the hood over River's head, confirming that she is a Doctor, that she has earned her doctorate in archeology. She wraps her doctoral gown around herself as she waits alone, afterwards. It's a symbol of everything she's been and of the third way she's found. Her memories are clear, all of them, she knows how to be an archeologist and she knows the Doctor loves and trusts her. She spreads her papers around her, a reminder, as she waits for the moment when she changes everything and for Madame Kovarian to come.


End file.
